Come home from work and there thousand people on the south wall, cops, few boats, ambos, 4 choppers but no one knows why..

Green dye in the water though. Maybe shark (prob not) maybe drowning?

Green dye is most properly predicting the currents.

MDSXR6T said...
Apparently a 12yo kid is missing.. no sign of him after at least 40 minutes. Beach is fairly calm and the current doesnt look too bad on the surface so who knows

Beautiful day out there, but if he fell in and can't swim, nor any of his friends, he probably went straight to the bottom

My heart goes out to his family, from the sound of it they came to Australia in search of new life for there kids, and life does this to them. What a shame!

MDSXR6T said...
RIP to the young bloke :( They found his body today. Such a sad and avoidable situation.

Just a few hundred metres north of the marina you have a perfect patrolled beach

I really want to put up a sign.. If you don't surf, body board or are a experienced surf swimmer you should not be swimming here..

I can say that after i saw his family, i wept like a baby.. Its just way to close to home for me.

youngbull said...
Signs are not the problem and will never fix the problem. It's the parents responsibility in this case, he was a child with limited marine knowledge. With saying that I do still feel compassion for all of his family.

Poor bugger. R.I.P little man.

I agree. But i think a sign, maybe one thats different than the council ones, something personial might help. Im actually talking with the schools in the area now as i think many people underestimate that beach. The water gets trapped and rips can be fierce, often taking people hundreds of meters out before letting them go..
If your not a water person, you wouldn't see it..Its not due to the size of the wave, more to do with the angles and the water gets trapped by teh rock walls. That with the tides it gets all over messy..Thats also why it sometimes get's real good too.

About a month ago two young kids who i spoke to and told them they had to go in, 30 minutes later were rescued by a surfed from about 100 feet out and returned to the beach. The mum didn't even realise they were still in the water. Both kids were under 11.

Even a national govt advertising campaign asking the public if they know how to swim (or float) most Aussies take it for granted that water and the ocean r just plain part of our culture and learning to swim is as important to us as learning to read. This country was and is built by and full of immigrants (no disrespect to our indigenous folk) there must be a big contingent of these who can't swim.
RIP little man.

Some of us seem to have forgotten their childhood.
A sign saying no = yes.
A sign saying do not enter = welcome mat.
A sign saying swim between the flags = swim 100mt to the side.

We as adults still continue to ignore 90% of signs unless they cost us money.
I and many would agree education is the first defense.

I reckon 'Nippers' is a great program and my wife & I have made it compulsory for our kids for at least the first few years. Our 9 & 7yo already know about rips, currents & although a couple of times I've stood on the beach nervous about how far they are swimming out in some pretty ordinary conditions (during mock rescues & basic ocean appreciation), I know that they are in good hands with the SLSC.

Swimming is a great start, but as a friend of ours (from 'the city') mentioned a few weeks back when his 11yo daughter went for her first swim in the ocean - "swimming in a pool doesn't teach you how to appreciate the power of the ocean." His daughter regularly swims 'laps', but when she got knocked off her feet in a small shore-break she had no idea what hit her & began to panic.

It sounds treacherous. I had a bit of an experience at Alex in Qld a few weeks back, got caught out in a current & pushed on to some rocks...very scary & lucky only to cop a bit of bark off the legs, although I blamed stupidity on my part.

^^^^^^So there were signs saying its not a patrolled beach and how to swim out of a rip. But they still chose to swim there? Goes back to Youngbull's comment last night. At face value it seems to be a combination of a weak swimmer, ignorance and a lack of supervision.

Even if a system was developed you have two big hurdles, firstly the logistics of covering 100km of Perth metro coast, secondly computers can't swim, the response time for someone to respond to an emergency relying on monitoring equipment will most likely exceed the survivability of a weak swimmer in a rip.

Yes there are some known hotspots, but rips by nature can be very transient and short-lived. Monitoring them all is an impossible challenge, that is why we are always encouraged to swim between the flags.

Swimming outside the flags is a personal choice and we shoulder our own consequences if we do so. It's a shame the young fella drowned but for what ever reason he chose to swim there. The only thing that would make this a genuine tragedy is if he couldn't read English and had no beach knowledge.

^^^ yeah but as Chris says - who will respond?

On-the-ball camera operator sees person in trouble within 60 sec.

He calls the nearest rescue peeps, lets say 500m away cos this is an ideal world.

They jump on a quad and race there.

The person has now been underwater for 60sec plus. He is dead.

Now lets add in realism - camera operator has 10hrs shift fatigue, the phone is busy, the quad takes 10sec to start and some idiot waves them down for a chat on the way, and they are 2km away. It is easily a 10min response time.

We have the best system possoble, which is monitored sections of beach where there are real people watching a short section of beach.

If people choose not to use that ... well.....

The sad part is they didn't know any better .... so we need to address why. Cos any kid passing away is a great tragedy

Not taken as a criticism Youngbull, so it's all good.

You are effectively asking each camera to cover 3km each (allowing for an overlap and built in redundancy). That's a zoom of 1500 metres, the camera would have such a narrow field of view and poor resolution at maximum range it would be totally ineffective. Plus you would also need an office full of staff watching 100 monitors and constantly panning them.

Probably double the number of cameras that you suggest, plus each camera would cost way more than $10k, especially if they are not parked right next to mains power and phone/data connection. To install a camera that is vandal proof, theft proof, most likely solar powered, optically useful, marine/salt resistant, and wifi connected to a line of site server you are all of a sudden talking about $50 to $100k per camera, plus the remote servers and monitoring centre you are now talking not much change out of $30 or $40 million. Plus maybe 50 staff (once you add in support staff, camera staff, management, techies, cleaners etc etc) you are talking $5 million a year in running costs.

Then you have to talk about emergency response staff... To provide a timely response you would need two staff at every camera site. All of a sudden annual costs have gone through the roof.

The alternative is as Mark has suggested and we already have in place, small, safe sections of beach at regular intervals along the coast, staffed and patrolled by volunteers with red and yellow flags to say, "here is a safe place to swim ". And I guarantee they have a better response than any government run service because they are already there and concentrating their efforts into a small manageable area, plus they are on the beach already and probably do more for prevention than any other option. Cost per year? volunteers, so almost nothing, capital contributions by local government for club rooms, corporate funding plus operating costs for consumables like uniforms and fuel.

Probably the biggest issue to address with this drowning is whether there were any issues with education and whether the young fella has been in Australia long enough to be exposed to any education on beach hazards and whether his English is adequate. Media is reporting him as a 14 year old African boy, first question I have is how long has he been in Oz.

That's a shame then, he probably saw the sign and went in anyway.

Chris6791 said...
That's a shame then, he probably saw the sign and went in anyway.

Thats why I am talking education.

You can almost understand the chinese diving in at Bondi like lemmings, they are just off the plane. Bondi Rescue is liek groundhog day for Choganese drowning.

But an african refugee kid has been here for say a year or three. At school they have swimming lessons. Obviously he missed out, maybe because mum n dad don't know the significance of such?

I am not blaming it on the school, geez too much sh!t gets blamed on them, but maybe Ed Dept neeeds to to look at kids from other cultures, they are way behind the aussie classmates who can already swim 100m in the ocean and mum n dad don't see it as a priority as they don't know any better either.

Needs to be looked at.